5 Practices that No Blogger Should Forget

There is no doubt that WordPress is a powerful content management system. It greatly simplifies the process of blogging and makes reviewing web traffic information significantly easier. Best of all, it is completely free. However, like any powerful tool, bloggers must know how to use it properly to really take advantage of all its features. The following is a brief list of WordPress practices that every blogger should consider if they want to maximize their blogging efficiency.

Blogging Practice which ever blogger should follow:

Cater to Your Readers

Remember the old adage “the customer is always right”? Well, this applies to your readers, too. Your readers are your bread and butter and without them, your blog would suffer. So reward your loyal readers and make it easier to bring in more readers. Whether your audience is visiting to your blog for entertainment or education, it is important to keep them engaged and interested. There are a number of ways to do this, including adding graphics, video, or having interactive features like allowing comments or installing a poll.

Aside from spammy advertisements or offensive content, there are other ways in which your blog can turn away readers. One of the ways to repel your readers is by making your posts difficult to read. Break up your content into relevant paragraphs and start each paragraph with a heading. You can take this a step further by creating lists, which allow readers to extrapolate the information from your post without having to spend a lot of time reading it.

Optimize

Once you’ve labored over creating great content for your blog, you probably want that blog to be accessible by search engines as well. This is where Search Engine Optimization comes in. But search engine optimization doesn’t just apply to the text; it applies to images as well. If you’re adding images to your blog, don’t forget to provide information about the image in the “alt” attributes (often mistakenly called “alt tags”).

The “alt” attribute will not only help provide information about the image for visitors that cannot display images in their browser, but it can also help with keyword targeting too. Though you don’t want to stuff your “alt” attributes with keywords, it helps to provide some sort of context about the image that someone could end up finding in an image search. An image titled “red-balloon.jpg” provides a lot more information to humans and search engines than “IMG_0001.jpg”.

Choose Your Widgets Wisely

Another way to make it more user-friendly is to provide social bookmarking buttons on your posts. By making it easier and quicker to bookmark your post on various social media sites, you’ll be able to vastly improve your blog’s social media marketing efforts. There are several widgets available that can be implemented into your blog.

However, it is important that you also don’t overdo it with plug-ins either. Having too many plug-ins can greatly increase the time it takes for your blog to download, and for readers with slower connections – or those that are just impatient – that can lead to a higher bounce rate. Remember the first tip – keep your readers engaged! Though you may find that the WordPress SEO by yoast is all you need for plug-ins on your blog, other plug-ins like Lijit and SEO Smart Links can provide some of the functionality you need without having several different plug-ins running at once.

Don’t Go Stale

One of the other ways to help keep your blog readership satisfied is by producing fresh content. Though you don’t want to supplement content quality for content quantity, it is still a good practice to provide new content regularly. This not only appeals to your readers and RSS subscribers, it also tells Google and other search engines that you are not a parked domain and that you are not going stale. On that note, ask yourself: What posts provide the greatest value to readers? Can I find ways of tapping into those niches? Researching internet marketing methods that are the most successful can help streamline your blogging and make it a lot more efficient, so take the time to do some homework from time to time to see what works best for your blog.